Moorish Spain

216 Pages·1992·3.11 MB·English

by  Richard Fletcher

To
Houston and Lucinda Shaw Stewart
incomparable travelling companions
in
Al-Andalus and the Maghrib
Moorish Spain
Richard Fletcher
CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Illustrations and Maps
Preface
1 Romance and Reality
2 The Secret of the Tower
3 The Curve of Conversion
4 The Caliphate of Córdoba
5 The Party Kings: ‘Cats puffed up to look like Lions’
6 The Moroccan Fundamentalists
7 Convivencia
8 Nasrid Granada
9 An August Pomegranate
Notes on further reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Richard Fletcher
Copyright
ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS
1 The interior of the great mosque at Córdoba (Roland Michaud, John
Hillelson Agency)
2 Ivory casket made in Córdoba in AH 359/AD 969-70 (Victoria and Albert
Museum)
3 Fresco of figure praying, from the Pyrenean church of Sant Quirze de
Pedret, c. 1000 (MAS, Barcelona)
4 Mozarabic architecture: the church of San Miguel de Escalada near León
(Spanish National Tourist Office)
5 Illustration of St John from a tenth-century manuscript (Pierpont Morgan
Library, New York: M.644, f.3v)
6 Santiago Matamoros (St James the Moorslayer), from an engraving of c.
1475 attributed to the School of Schongauer (Trustees of the British
Museum)
7 One of the votive crowns of Guarrazar, now in the Museo Arqueológico
Nacional, Madrid (MAS, Barcelona)
8 The aqueduct of Segovia (Spanish National Tourist Office)
9 Partial reconstruction of the caliphal palace of Madinat az-Zahra near
Córdoba (Roland Michaud, John Hillelson Agency)
10 A marble trough made for Almanzor in 987 now in the Museo
Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid (MAS, Barcelona)
11 A noria or waterwheel near Murcia (Rapho, Paris)
12 Astrolabe made at Toledo in 1068 (Museum of the History of Science,
Oxford University)
13 A casket of wood and ivory carved at Cuenca for a member of the princely
dynasty at Toledo in 1049–50 now in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional,
Madrid (MAS, Barcelona)
14 A silk textile of the eleventh century (Musée de Cluny, Paris)
15 The Almohad banner captured by Alfonso VIII of Castile at the battle of
Las Navas in 1212 (Editions d’Art Albert Skira)
16 The Torre del Oro at Seville (Spanish National Tourist Office)
17 James I of Aragon conquers Valencia: fresco of c. 1300 (MAS, Barcelona)
18, 19 Mudejar church architecture, in the Aragonese town of Teruel (Spanish
National Tourist Office)
20 Mudejar military architecture at Coca (Spanish National Tourist Office)
21 An example of Mudejar ceramics (Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid)
22 Averroes as represented in a western manuscript of the thirteenth century
(Bibliothèque National, Paris)
23 Christian and Muslim playing chess together, from an illustrated
manuscript of Alfonso X’s treatise on the game (Escorial, Madrid)
24, 25 The Synagoga del Tránsito in Toledo (Spanish National Tourist
Office)
26 Granada, the Alhambra: the Court of the Lions (Colin Grant)
27 Granada, the Alhambra: the Court of the Myrtles (Colin Grant)
28 The enforced baptism of the Moors of Granada in 1499: detail from the
Capilla Real, Granada, High Altar by Philippe Biguerny (MAS, Barcelona)
Maps
1 The Iberian Peninsula c. 800
2 The Iberian Peninsula c. 900
3 The Campaigns of Almanzor
4 The Taifa States
5 The Shrinking of Moorish Spain
PREFACE
This book is intended as an introduction to the history and culture of Islamic
Spain between the Berber invasion of the early eighth century and the expulsion
of the Moriscos by Philip III in the early seventeenth. It lays no claim to deep or
original scholarship. The reader I have had in mind while writing it is the
inquisitive traveller in Spain who might want to know something more than a
guidebook can tell him about the people who built the mosque of Córdoba or the
Alhambra at Granada. If it serves this purpose I shall be well satisfied.
I acknowledge with gratitude the advice and encouragement of Andrew Best,
and the constructive editorial vigilance of Allegra Huston. To them I offer my
thanks.
Richard Fletcher
Nunnington, York 1992
1
ROMANCE AND REALITY
In the year 711 a Berber army under Arab leadership crossed the Straits of
Gibraltar from Morocco in continuation of a series of raids which had been
going on for some time. The army was commanded by a general named Tariq
who is said to have given his name to his landfall on the northern side of the
Straits: Jebel Tariq, ‘the Rock of Tariq’, Gibraltar. In the following year a battle
was fought between the invaders and the army of Spain under its king Roderic or
Rodrigo and – astonishingly – Tariq’s troops were victorious. King Roderic was
slain and the invaders went on to take the capital city, Toledo. Within a very few
years the entire peninsula lay at their feet. As in England in 1066, the fortune of
a battle had decided the fate of a kingdom.
In Spain it had decided very much more than this. The early eighth-century
conquest signalled the beginnings of an Islamic presence in the Iberian peninsula
that would endure for the better part of a thousand years and whose impress
upon peninsular culture is still discernible. What is more, Islamic Spain would
come in time to offer the fruits of a higher civilisation to barbarian Europe
beyond the Pyrenees. European acceptance of this legacy, hesitant at first and
then full-hearted, decisively affected western culture, not just in Europe but also
in those New Worlds discovered and settled by Europeans in the early modern
period. So much may be said to have stemmed from Tariq’s raid. That is why, in
the last resort, Moorish Spain is worth trying to understand.
We are ourselves responsible for some of the obstacles that prevent
understanding. Consider this passage, for example:
Beautiful and fierce, seductive and pagan, Andalusia is a world unto itself. Probably no other region in
Europe is so romantic, mysterious and atmospheric … with its incredible Moorish legacy, its vast
mountains, parched plains, superb cities and magical villages.
The words are those of a British travel brochure designed to appeal to the
discerning holidaymaker who sets his sights higher than the bars and fish and
chip shops of, say, Torremolinos. Banal they may be, but they hold out a
promise which echoes existing expectations – of romance, mystery and
atmosphere. Such expectations are fairly recent. They gained currency during the
Romantic movement of the nineteenth century. For the English-speaking world
two authors in particular seem to have been largely responsible for this image of
southern Spain: Washington Irving (1783–1859) and Richard Ford (1796–1858).
Irving, a member of the United States legation in Madrid from 1826, travelled
widely in the south and published his very popular Tales of the Alhambra in
1832. Ford, who lived for three years in Seville in the 1830s and also travelled
indefatigably, published his Handbook for Travellers in Spain in 1845, a work
which was long to remain the indispensable companion for English visitors.
These two works, and others which bobbed along in their wake, did much to
shape Anglo-American assumptions about the character of Spain, especially
southern Spain, her people and their customs. These assumptions have left their
mark in surprising places; for instance in the deservedly celebrated children’s
tale of Ferdinand the Bull. The brochure quoted above shows that they are still
very much alive.
Any attempt to understand the history and culture of the Iberian peninsula must
take account of that ‘incredible Moorish legacy’: but the enquirer should be
prepared to find the reality less exotic than the stereotype. Less exotic, yes, but
certainly unfamiliar to those habituated like Irving and Ford to the cultural
traditions of the English-speaking peoples. Consider the most famous
architectural monument of southern Spain, the great mosque of Córdoba, built in
stages between the late eighth century and the late tenth. Here is a building
which is constructed in accordance with an architectural aesthetic which is
utterly different from that governing the design of the places of worship of the
Christian west. In a church there is a line of tension which runs from west to
east; the eye is led unerringly to the altar. There is no comparable focus in the
great mosque. True, it has (like other mosques) a mihrab or prayer-niche in the
south wall, to indicate the qibla or direction of Mecca and to provide a sounding-
chamber from which the imam may recite the word of God. The mihrab receives
special architectural and decorative emphasis but it does not exert a ‘pull’ in the
way that the altar does in a Gothic cathedral. Muslim worship can take place
wherever the worshipper is standing or kneeling, and involves no mediating
priesthood. There is no ‘holy of holies’: the entire hall of prayer, with its 800-
odd columns and its two-tier horseshoe arches, is a holy place. And this it
emphatically is: even the most thick-skinned of visitors, the most assertively
secular spirits have found themselves subdued and calmed by the tranquil,
reposeful air of the place, for which we must be grateful to the cunning of
successive architects.
But it is not uniformly calm. At its heart lies architectural evidence of strife.